Location

Milan, Italy

Program

Retail, Office, and Hotel

Size

7,500 square meters

Dates

2009

Key Staff

Eric McNevin, Jose Herrasti, Fernanda Oppermann Bento

Key Consultants

Structural, MEP, and Environmental: Buro Happold

Milan is a city of unique roof profiles, a city of "tops". Punctuated by spires, domes, vaults, and arcades, the city’s urban history can be read along its distinct skyline profile. The Garage Traversi will be an essential addition to that history -- a conspicuously modern one. Crowned with glass and photovoltaic panels the building will become an important new roof top marker for innovative architecture combined with a sustainable green advocacy.

Milan is also a city full of pedestrian life -- of plazas, pedestrian promenades, and fountains integrated with the commercial, entertainment, living and working life of the city. The Garage Traversi will make an important addition to that street life by adding a cafe and gallery -- a unique architectural event -- to the chronology of adjacent streets and plazas, art and commerce. Part arcade, part plaza, part galleria, the new ground floor, basement and second level of the project will be an important spatial addition to a city of unique pedestrian events, a city of "bottoms".

Extending both skyward, and at its base, the new building exploits the concept and form of the building’s original innovative concrete structure. The double-beam cast-in-place concrete structure is reinvented, re-imagined with new purposes at both "top" and "bottom" additions to the project. The structural beam system, now pre-cast,, is extended on the first two floors to create the new entry space along via Bagutta. Above the existing roof line, two new hotel floors and an inclined glass wall and roof are supported by replicating the original structural system and inclining it vertically, now more mast than beam, to support the additional floor areas. The new pre-cast masts, acknowledging the original structural history of the building, extend vertically above the roofline -- new photovoltaic towers that twist to optimize the sun angle for electrical energy production, and symbolize the contemporary concern for alternative energy systems.